The Ender Quintet Quotes

“Who was more cursed, the one who died, unknowing until the very moment of his death, or the one who watched his destruction as it approached, step by step, for days and weeks and years?”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“He wasn’t preoccupied, he was unoccupied. He had detached himself from the world. And her job was to reconnect him. To bring him back and show him his place in the web of humanity.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“Surround a child with lies, and he clings to them like a teddy bear, like his mother’s hand. And the worse, the darker the lie, the more deeply he has to draw it inside himself in order to bear the lie at all.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“It occurred to me then for the first time that the idea of the story is nothing compared to the importance of knowing how to find a character and a story to tell around that idea.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“Most scientists believe in God,” said Sel. “Certainly most of us here.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“So? Sometime or other everybody wishes everybody would go away. Sometimes I’ll wish you would go away. What I’m telling you now is that even at those times, even if I tell you to go away, you don’t have to go away.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“I speak to everyone in the language they understand,” said Ender. “That isn’t being slick. It’s being clear.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“Yes,” said Ender. “He’s one of your flock, isn’t he? So leave the ninety-nine, shepherd, and come with us to save the one that’s lost.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“True believers in a cause often behaved in self-defeating ways because they expected other people to see the rightness of their cause if they just stated it clearly enough. As a result, they tipped their hand in every game and couldn’t understand why everyone ganged up against them.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“It was better, she thought, to be able to select from the whole menu of human achievements than to be bound within one narrow range.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“It’s all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they’re never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“They feel very stupid and strange, the things going through your mind. You’re making us very tired, with all your thinking of stupid imaginary impossible things.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“we’ll go fishing.” “So it won’t be heaven for the fish.” “It’ll be hell for everybody. But with good moments.” “Just like our lives right now,”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“The leader only has as much power as his followers give him.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“we are strange indeed among all the plants and animals, who unlike us know their place, and if they think of God at all do not imagine him to be their kin, or themselves to be his heirs.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“That’s how war is fought, in case any of you have foolish ideas to the contrary. You don’t fight with minimum force, you fight with maximum force at endurable cost. You don’t just pink your enemy, you don’t even bloody him, you destroy his capability to fight back. It’s the strategy you use with diseases.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“somewhere in his heart he knew that even a child is a real person, that a child’s acts are real acts, that even a child’s play is not without moral context.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“you’ll dream, too. Why should we want to? As you say, it’s meaningless. Random firings of the synapses of the neurons in their brains. They’re practicing. They’re doing it all the time. Coming up with stories. Making connections. Making sense out of nonsense.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“Individually, human beings are all dolts. While collectively … Collectively, they’re a collection of dolts.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“he was patient with their tendency to ignore him, and learned to make his proposals and suggest his plans through the few adults who listened to him, and let them present them as their own. He was concerned, not about getting credit, but about getting the job done.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“I’ve got a pretty good idea what children are, and we’re not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren’t in armies, they aren’t commanders, they don’t rule over forty other kids,”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“the clock said 0340, and Ender felt groggy as he padded along the corridor behind Mazer. “Early to bed and early to rise,” Mazer intoned, “makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“We are contemplating the nature of desire,” said Han Fei-tzu. “Whose desire?” she asked. “And for what?” My desire for your bones to heal and become strong, so that they don’t snap at the slightest pressure. So that you could stand again, or even raise an arm without your own muscles tearing away chunks of bone or causing the bone to break under the tension. So that I wouldn’t have to watch you wither away until now you weigh only eighteen kilograms. I never knew how perfectly happy we were until I learned that we could not stay together. “My desire,” he answered. “For you.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant. But these are natural limitations inherent to the science. It is the artificial limitations that hamper us—and, through us, you.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“Excuse me, but if God wanted to do everything himself, what did he make us for in the first place?”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“Will the kind of love I have for you be enough, Wang-mu? To reach out to you when I’m in need, and to try to be here for you when you need me back. And to feel such tenderness when I look at you that I want to stand between you and all the world: and yet also to lift you up and carry you above the strong currents of life; and at the same time, I would be glad to stand always like this, at a distance, watching you, the beauty of you, your energy as you look up at these towering mound-people, speaking to them as an equal even though every movement of your hands, every fluting syllable of your speech cries out that you’re a child—is it enough for you that I feel these loves for you? Because it’s enough for me. And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile

“It’s also like being born,” said Ender. “As long as you keep getting born, it’s all right to die sometimes.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ender Quintet: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile